Most want to make it as amicable as possible

Like having an office manager tell you to gtfo, instead of the CEO who was “deeply sorry” for all this, or calling everyone to the floor, reading off a list of names, and then saying “If you heard your name, this is your last day with the company”, or the people who find out by not being able to access their work accounts (google, outlook, slack, whatever). Sure is amicable.

It all smacks of the same energy Spez gave off when he’s “listening to people’s concerns” while demodding people right and left and being unwilling to budge on the amazingly arbitrary API cut off.

Layoffs indicate one thing and one thing only: the leadership made some wrong choices along the way, and so they’re going to step on the people that had no input into the process that got them there, so they, the people who made those bad choices, can stick around and continue to make more bad bets. No amount of “mercy” or “empathy” can ameliorate the fact that they’re screwing other people over in their own interests.

A key example of this is that in virtually every single layoff severance package, they never move the vesting cliff forwards. Been there less than a year and not at your 25% cliff? Guess what, those n months you spent are worth fuck all. If they were as sorry and merciful as they claim they were, they’d move the cliff up and give you the appropriate percentage of your options. Laid off 2 months before your cliff? Cool, here you go, you get 20.75% of your total (assuming 4 years with 1 year being 25%) vesting package. But no, they just take those shares from you as if they had fired you, because thats all a layoff really is: mass firings

You aren’t entitled to a job in perpetuity

And the people that mass fire people to save their own asses aren’t entitled to sympathy. They are the bad guy in this situation.

Since you asked for some things that make laying off people less shitty for the people who actually suffer and not the “poor” CEOs, here’s some low cost things you can do that don’t fuck people over quite as much. Shopify did some of these when they had to cut workforce:

• Give them enough severance to cover the time till they actually find another job. No need to support a freeloader, but no need to be a miser either.
• Help them start their job search. Your recruiters know other recruiters, they can put the names out and give them some options
• Actually do the terminations in person, not just an email you send out about how hard it is, or worse, having an underling do it.
• Do more for insurance and other benefits than the bare minimum COBRA requires
• Give them the option to keep or purchase (at significantly reduced cost) their work equipment. For many people their work computer becomes their only computer. If you need it back for legal reasons, buy them an equivalent computer, if they want it
• Give them their stock vesting, regardless of cliff date.
• Keep their slack and other accounts open, at least till the EOD, so they have a chance to say goodbye to the “survivors”
• Don’t lay people off before a holiday weekend. That shortens the time they have for job search by at least one day, if not longer, and lets them have all that wonderful time to stew in it

None of that sounds too egregious, yet its almost never done by the “deeply sympathetic” leadership.